The Driver

by Hart Hanson

  Why didn’t I inform law enforcement?

  Because I wanted to live!

  Convinced that poor Bismarck Avila was a victim of Asher Keet (blame the dead guy), forced to launder money by threats on his life and those around him, including his cousin Rocky (blame another dead guy), my intent was to trade the barrels of money for freedom. If I’d informed the police, they’d have taken the barrels of money, and Asher Keet (dead guy) would have killed everyone around Avila, including me and the beautiful Nina Sprey.

  I stuck with that basic narrative through line no matter what holes Connie, Delilah, assorted defense lawyers, prosecutors, and journalists found and probed.

  Did everyone believe me?

  Life lesson: not only does everybody not believe one hundred percent of any story; nobody believes one hundred percent of any story, so the best you can hope for is that each and every part of your story is believed by somebody.

  Blame the bad dead guy. Everybody will believe at least a part of your story.

  Connie is a very good lawyer and she worked especially hard to prove that Lucky was blameless so that he wouldn’t be deported to Afghanistan and have his head cut off by the Taliban. In fact, over the first few months, the publicity surrounding Lucky’s plight actually worked to his benefit, shining a light on the fact that our brave Afghan interpreters and their families have earned the support of the American people.

  Lucky ended up getting a two-year working visa and a path to citizenship.

  My legal journey was bumpier.

  There were questions about whether I’d used too much force with Slim and Nick and Keet. (I did, after all, blind one of them before kicking his head so hard it separated from his spinal column. I blasted a teenager with a shotgun. I shot the last through the eyeball with a hollow-point bullet.) But Connie persuaded Tums and his lawyer to demonize Keet (the legal version of blame the dead guy) in order to ameliorate Tums’s own dire legal situation.

  Tums and his public defender ran with the concept far beyond Connie’s wildest hopes. Not only did the cunning Mr. Tums imply that I had no choice but to kill the psychotic bad guys, but Tums confessed that the money-laundering scheme had been his idea and forced upon an oblivious (and somewhat stupid) Avila, who, once he discovered the money laundering, tried to stop it and, if it hadn’t been for me, would have been killed.

  Mr. Tums also stated that he had heard from Slim (blame the dead guy) that Keet had ordered Slim to kill Willeniec when the crooked cop demanded a percentage of the money-laundering scheme.

  Tums said Keet had ordered X-Ray murdered in jail for his part in stealing the barrels.

  Every ray of light the cooperative Mr. Tums shone on the task force investigation resulted in a corresponding generous plea deal.

  A few months later, in July, Tums provided me with another insight. Our lawyers left us alone together in a courthouse corridor, Tums in his wheelchair (he would never walk again), me on a cane (a prop to garner sympathy).

  Tums said, “Hey, Santa Anas, you and me, we’re gonna come out of this okay. I go to jail for a while; you pull probation. When I’m up for parole, you come and say nice things about me, right?”

  A gust of the hot, unforgiving Santa Ana wind wafted through a broken window and I heard Keet and Nick laughing and, in his gentle vicar’s voice, Slim whispered, Tumsknowshowtofallandhowtoland.

  Tums called it. Connie got the serious charges against me dropped and got me probation on the misdemeanors. Keet got blamed for Willeniec’s disappearance and presumed murder. The homicide investigation was closed.

  Avila was cleared of most criminal charges attached to the money-laundering scheme and paid a hefty fine for the rest. Last I heard he was proceeding to take B!$m@R©k! public.

  I went back to Oasis Limo.

  Life went back to normal.

  Except, of course, it didn’t. How could it?

  Lucky, Tinkertoy, and I had lost Ripple and we were hurting. We closed ranks around that pain, figuring no one else could understand.

  Ripple’s parents and widow (the divorce had not been finalized at the time of his death) claimed his body when it was finally released by the coroner. They wanted him buried in Three Rivers, a small town across the San Joaquin Valley, up against the Sierra mountains in Tulare County. It was Tinkertoy, now living in half the duplex while Lucky lived in the other half, who not only asked us to take her to Ripple’s funeral but asked that the three of us dress up in our dress uniforms.

  “Not a chance,” I said.

  “With. All. Our medals,” Tinkertoy insisted.

  “No uniform,” I said. “No medals.”

  “Please,” Tinkertoy said.

  “She said please,” Lucky said.

  “No. Not gonna happen. The subject is closed.”

  Two o’clock in the morning, the night before Ripple’s funeral, scheduled to leave Santa Monica for Ripple’s hometown of Three Rivers at seven A.M., I awoke to knocking, shocking because no one ever knocks on my door because it is, when you come right down to it, a mobile home craned up onto the roof. I answered the door to reveal Lucky and, behind him, Tinkertoy, who had never in her life come up to my home on the roof.

  Tinkertoy cradled an antique artist’s desk in her arms—the one Connie had bought for Ripple as a get-well gift after his operation.

  “Tinkertoy has Something To Share with you,” Lucky said.

  “We were supposed to turn all of Ripple’s belongings over to his family,” I said.

  “We’ll do it tomorrow after Ripple’s funeral,” Lucky said, “if you still think we should.”

  “Make. Some. Tea,” Tinkertoy said.

  Which I did, during which time Lucky and Tinkertoy made themselves comfortable at the small, round, flecked Formica table in my kitchen. The one I hardly ever use because I prefer to sit outside at my wooden picnic table.

  “What’s going on?” I said, placing mugs in front of everybody and dumping a handful of sugar cubes onto the table.

  Tinkertoy looked at Lucky, everybody’s translator.

  “Tinkertoy found some things in Ripple’s desk,” Lucky said.

  “And it’s important to look at them now? In the middle of the night before an early-morning three-hour drive?”

  “Yes.”

  Tinkertoy opens Ripple’s lap desk and removes one of his pen-and-ink drawings. Typical Ripple, it features a row of dead children hanging from their necks from a gibbet while mangy, skinny curs snap at their dangling feet. One or two of the dogs have caught a foot and swing above the other dogs. Nearby a group of laughing, clapping people of all ages and races sit on bleachers, eating popcorn, drinking sodas, having a lovely time.

  “So? Ripple was fucked-up. We all knew that. He’d have worked his way through it.”

  Tinkertoy looks at Lucky. Lucky nods. Tinkertoy pulls another drawing from the desk. I gird myself for whatever unpleasantness is coming.

  But this drawing is different. It features Tinkertoy at her workbench in the mechanic’s bay, rendered in pencil, almost like a photograph. Tinkertoy’s face is calm and beautiful and focused on her work; her hands are strong and fluid and in motion, the line of her back indicating her strength and her dignity.

  My throat tightens. I find I cannot speak.

  Tinkertoy places a second drawing on the first.

  This one is pen and ink. Comic. It features Lucky looking at the haunted Caddie askance. The Caddie has been subtly anthropomorphized, looking back at him—but it’s Lucky’s face that draws your eye: full of warmth and humor and skepticism and philosophy and wisdom and kindness.

  “That’s Lucky, all right,” I say, stupidly, because it’s an understatement.

  Tinkertoy dips into Ripple’s desk again and places a third drawing on top of the other two.

  It’s me.

  You’ll excuse me if
I don’t describe it in detail, but I will say that it shows the best version of me. The man I’d like to be. The man my family thinks I am. I want this to be true. I want to be that guy.

  My heart aches to think that Ripple considered me to be this man.

  Tinkertoy is not done.

  She places a fourth drawing on top of the one Ripple did of me.

  This one is of Ripple himself. I mean, you might not see it that way. In fact, only the three of us, me, Tinkertoy, and Lucky, hunkered over a sketch in the middle of the night, would know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is a self-portrait, because the face is too small to make out. It’s drawn from the point of view of the sniper who shot Ripple, moments before the shot, a brave young soldier, standing on two legs, confident in his manhood and his fine self, thinking he’s immortal and untouchable, checking his fives and twenty-fives, doing his soldier’s job and doing it well. In a moment, that boy’s life will change; he’ll be bleeding on the ground. He’ll lose both his legs. He’ll lose what he considered to be his life, but in this moment he is still whole, and that’s the version of his self that Ripple drew in order to preserve himself from time and violence and inevitable disaster.

  “Wait,” I say. “Wait.”

  Trying, like Ripple, to stop time with a word.

  Wait!

  My vision narrows to where I see only Tinkertoy’s calloused hands on my kitchen table and I see a tear plop onto her knuckle and I see Lucky’s hand wipe that tear but I’m unable to look up at their faces; I can only look at Ripple’s self-portrait in my own hands, one of them puckered and misshapen, months away from healing from this misshapen claw back into a real hand.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “You’ll wear your uniform?”

  “I’ll wear my uniform. And medals.”

  “Thank. You.”

  Tinkertoy and Lucky take Ripple’s drawings with them when they leave. Except for one.

  They also leave Ripple’s desk.

  It’s now my desk. My inheritance. Inside it I keep Ripple’s drawing of me so that when I see it I am reminded to be a better man because if I don’t then I’ll be disappointing the courageous, pale-assed, orange-haired stoner kid with no legs who sacrificed his life to save his friends.

  Mom and Dad came to Ripple’s funeral. So did Connie and Delilah. And Gracie Quan, holding hands with Lucky. Ripple’s parents blinked when they saw the strange group of us all standing in the cemetery near the river, brokenhearted, including the fierce state senator who never left my side.

  We watched Ripple’s wife play up the grieving-widow routine and we disliked her intensely for abandoning Ripple, but, following Lucky’s example, we were kind to her and her family and Ripple’s mother and father.

  What a shocking flash of orange Ripple must have been among that wan, colorless group.

  After the graveside ceremony, everyone streaming out of the cemetery, I circled back on my own and placed my Distinguished Service Cross on Ripple’s casket just before the cemetery workers filled in the grave. Maybe it’s because ghost voices speak in my ear, but if there was any chance that I could convey to Ripple what I thought of his final act of bravery, well, I’d take it.

  Afterward, in the parking lot along the road, I found myself standing with Mom, Delilah, and Connie.

  “You look good in uniform,” Connie said.

  “Don’t talk bullshit, Constanta,” Mom said.

  (You will recall that Mom and Connie do not like each other.)

  “You don’t think he looks good, Dolly?”

  “You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Mom said, and Connie gritted her teeth. Senator versus lawyer. The System versus the Rebel.

  “All right, now,” Delilah said.

  “It’s not all right,” Connie said. “Michael is lying and you say I’m talking bullshit and you expect me to pasar por alto about it.”

  “I expect you to be a grown-up about it,” Mom said, “and maybe stop throwing in little Spanish phrases for no reason so you can feel special. Maybe stop smacking us with your statements, ask a question every now and then like you don’t already know everything in the world worth knowing.”

  “All right, now,” Delilah said again (the way you’d expect Gandhi to say it).

  “You ever think if Michael tells you the truth you’d have to do something about it?” Mom asked Connie. “And if you didn’t do something about it, you’d feel obliged to change your profession or your view of yourself? If Mikey asked my opinion, which he did not, I’d say go ahead and put that self-righteous prig on a razor’s edge, see what she’s made of.”

  “You called me a prick!”

  “Prig! Prig! Look it up and see a photo of yourself.”

  “All right, now,” Delilah said, using her cop voice this time, nipping a riot in the bud.

  “It’s a funeral,” I said.

  “Not mine,” Mom said. “And not yours.”

  Mom walked one way. Connie walked the other.

  Delilah said, “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She’s terrific, isn’t she?”

  “Sure,” Delilah said. “Which one?”

  We looked at each for a couple of moments. She patted my chest three times—then poked the empty space where my DSC had been pinned. She raised her eyebrows at me. I shrugged. Delilah looked over to where Gracie Quan stood holding hands with Lucky, Tinkertoy standing a few feet away, looking up at the mountains, then over toward Mom and Dad, arm in arm, and she sighed.

  “How’s about I drive you home?” But it was a different kind of question this time.

  So I nodded.

  Delilah and I spent the next twelve hours in the Best Motel in Mojave. (That’s not descriptive; the place is actually named the Best Motel and it happens to be in the town of Mojave.)

  What we did there was wonderful. It shook me up. It set me up. It raised me up. Another kind of sanctuary. It reminded me that life is good and sweet and too fragile and too short.

  “This is a onetime thing,” Delilah said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m an investigator in an ongoing case that won’t be resolved for a couple of years and you are a very active person of interest in much of that case and an outright suspect in some of the rest.”

  “We could compartmentalize.”

  “As a newly minted member of Robbery-Homicide, I can’t afford to have a boyfriend who’s on probation.”

  “What about when I’m off probation?”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  But Delilah was happy that I’d asked and rewarded me with a reverse cowgirl that deserved a National Rodeo Gold Medal.

  Delilah dropped me off at Oasis. When I leaned over to give her a kiss, she placed her hand on my chest and stopped me cold.

  “Just so you know, I’m pretty sure I know what really happened.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Even to Willeniec.”

  I said nothing. She laughed and I knew why. Silence means consent.

  “Then why’d you take me to bed?”

  “Surface of the earth,” she said, smiling at me like Delilah. But seconds later it was Robbery-Homicide Detective Groopman who drove away, so that whole situation is about as clear as mud.

  Which I took as a sign that it was time for me to leave the surface of the earth and take a swing at history.

  THE RULE OF THREES

  I don’t know for absolute sure whether the voices I hear in the wind are supernatural or if they’re just in my head. Do they tell me things I don’t know or things I just don’t know consciously? Are those voices my own guilty subconscious trying to tell me something and the only way to get my attention is to speak to me in the voices of those whose lives I’ve taken?

  Or do ghosts actually exist?

  A few days after Ripple’s
funeral, Keet whispered, Aviladoesn’tknowaboutthethirdbarrel.

  My intention was to pull in the marker Avila owed me and sell him Oasis Limo with the caveat that he had to keep on Tinkertoy and Lucky for as long as they wanted to work there.

  I asked my mom to ask her contacts for a place where a slightly infamous poster boy for PTSD could work to benefit veterans. She warned me that with all the criminal charges and probation, it would have to be behind the scenes. Maybe at one of the big charities.

  I was thinking about those options, standing on my porch, when a breeze caressed my cheek and Willeniec chimed in to remind me about the third barrel.

  Perhaps you thought I’d forgotten that there was a third barrel of money unaccounted for? I didn’t forget; I just didn’t care.

  Until now.

  I hurried down to where Lucky was sitting in Dispatch and reminded him that when the police opened the two barrels from the deserted mall, one of them contained 1.3 million dollars in cash and the other contained 3.1 million dollars in cash.

  “You are Making Reference to the third barrel,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “If you thought that blood money was out there and nobody had it, then you’d leave it. What you don’t like is that you think somebody has that money and that they shouldn’t.”

  Which goes to show that Mystical Voices That Tell The Truth don’t come exclusively from the ghosts of those who die violently by my hand.

  “Who do you think has that money?” Lucky asked.

  “Gimme a second,” I said. “This is new to me. I was thinking right up until this moment that the money was still hidden out there somewhere—that nobody has it—until you told me otherwise.”

  Lucky flapped his hands at Allah, sorry he’d said anything.

  Like many mathematical equations, it wasn’t that hard to figure out once you realized there was an equation just waiting to be figured out. (Ask Einstein.)